GenderBendy

Job hunting, and a night on the town

I haven’t posted much since the surgery because I have a willful literal part of my brain which tries to make something so because something else is so, as in, I’ve had the surgery, so I'm not trans any more - I’m just another ordinary woman now, dammit. These kinds of simplistic formulations can help with motivation and focus, but they don’t turn out to be exactly true, which leads to stress. The trans thing just keeps coming up again.

For example, I’m job hunting. I like my current job, but after eleven years I itch for a new challenge. Also, as a practical matter, I need to start making a little more money if I can. So the question is, do I mention that I am trans in my applications?

It shouldn’t matter, but that doesn’t mean it won’t. There is definitely a lot of transphobia in the world, and in my experience even many enlightened liberal folks still have some work to do to get comfortable with a trans person. On the other hand, bringing the trans thing up early might actually make me a more attractive candidate for some positions. A trans woman might trump a cis woman in some people’s diversity tallies.

So far I have mentioned it (with a brief factual note at the head of my resume - experience before 2011 under the name...), because I did a lot of the stuff on my resume under my old male name, and I figure they might go looking online for, say, those articles I wrote back in the early 00’s. I might stop mentioning it though, if none of my current apps pan out, so they can think about me first, at least for a little while, as just as a woman who’s interested in their job.

It feels icky, having to calculate the when-to-tell issue, but I can't avoid it.

Then there’s dating, which so far just isn’t happening. I got feeling so antsy and fun-starved this week that I messaged Taffy, my dear outrageous drag queen friend, and arranged to share a night on the town. I wanted to get drunk, play pool, dance ecstatically, flirt, and maybe even kiss someone.

Which all happened except I didn’t kiss anyone, though someone did kiss me. I got drunk and played pool at Blackstones, and flirted with a guy at the table. In our short conversation just before Taffy and I left I saw and took an opening to include in a list of pert questions “So do you like guys?” which he answered with a careful “For the most part.” He was handsome, nearly as tall as me, and seemed quiet and kind. Hm, maybe we’ll bump into each other again.

On to Styxx, to dance ecstatically with a bunch of sweat-sheened twentysomethings. At some point I opened my eyes and a cute femme woman was dancing with me. We smiled at each other, and I enjoyed watching her dance - yep, I still like girl-bodies, especially the round softnesses. After a couple minutes she shouted something I couldn’t hear, pecked me on the cheek, and disappeared into the crowd. Later I found her on the floor again and we exchanged names. She excused herself with “I’m going to go get a drink, but I’ll find you later,” and I didn’t see her again, though I did look. Gentle brush-off? Doesn’t matter...she kissed me! :-) Hm, maybe we’ll bump into each other again.

The part I didn’t plan for was resting by the subwoofers with Taffy, our whole bodies vibrating to the pounding of the beat, and suddenly bursting into tears. Taffy held me while I cried and didn’t ask why. Such a good friend.

It’s thrilling out here in the light, and slowly I am becoming more accustomed to the feeling of constant emotional peril. The old sense of myself as a monster unfit to live among humans still intrudes from time to time, but I’m learning to weather those episodes. I guess I’m getting better at really being alive. Yay me. :-)

Time to go home

Last night in the garden there was a barbecue for the staff, because the patients who had their surgeries this week are the last batch before the clinic closes for a long summer break. The surgeons and nurses and housekeepers and other support staff laughed and drank wine and sang karaoke. Someone did a really good cover of CCR's "Rollin' on the River." In the early part of the evening, while it was still light, I was rubbernecking from the porch and saw that Dr. Bélanger, who was wearing a sun-dress and flip-flops, has a biohazard symbol tattooed in the middle of her back. 

I finally got to see my new parts completely yesterday when the last impediment - and my last remaining anxiety - was removed: a small wad of gauze stuck to a (perfectly common, normal) blood clot in the minutely-sutured clitoral area. I had been warned that as long as the wad was there, there was danger of threads from it ending up inside me during dilation, which could lead to infection. Patsy, the head nurse, worked patiently with a squeeze bottle of saline and a pair of tweezers, and finally succeeded in removing it. It was a pleasure to watch her work. Without exception, everyone who works here is really good at their jobs.

It transpires that I have had successful SRS at one of the best clinics for the procedure in the world. My results are amazing. In a few months, when the swelling and bruising are gone, the hair has grown out again, and the end of the douching regimen has allowed the development of natural flora, I will have a vagina which appears to all five senses so much like a natural-born one that not one of my hundreds of lovers will be able to tell the difference. I will be orgasmic - maybe even significantly more so than most natural-born women, it has been whispered -  and at least a little self-lubricating. I have a work of art between my legs.

I'm being driven back to Maine today by my dear friend Jessica, and my brother Brian is flying out and will be there when I arrive to stay the first few days home with me, just in case I get light-headed or need help digging a swimming pool. After he goes home I'll have the house to myself for several days; I have a couple of writing projects lined up and a new piano piece to practice, and various friends who have promised visits.  The next week my dear spawn return in the usual childcare rotation. Mad's girlfriend Annu, whom I adore, is visiting from Finland. No school, few stressors...summer in Maine with company! I'm back to work on August 6th.

All of which will need to be fit in between lots and lots of surgical after-care; the routine consumes several hours a day in the first few months.

In the fall and beyond, besides work, I'm looking forward to engaging with son Sam's senior year in high school, moving those writing projects forward, helping with the fight to win marriage equality in Maine in November, and playing more music. I'm trying to decide whether I have the time and the courage to sign up as an accompanist for the student-recitalists at the USM music schools. Oh, joy, something else to feel anxious excitement and anticipation about...and it has nothing to do with gender! :-)

With regards to transition, I'm still not done, but I have new ideas about how much more I am going to do. Electrolysis will definitely continue until my beard is gone, and I'm not done working on voice. Also, I get to resume hormones when I get home tonight, which, with the natural testosterone now gone, may still have further desirable effects. The remaining open questions are FFS, facial feminization surgery, and breast enhancement. I've spend a lot of time this week with women who have had both, and at the moment of this writing, I'm still 50-50 on FFS and only ten percent probable on breasts. In both cases, a really natural outcome is just so hard to achieve. At some point, more homework will begin.

The question is different. What I have done here in Montreal is fix a fundamental problem: I had a penis I hated, and now I have a vagina I love. I already have a face and breasts, so there is no absolute - only a tangle of conflicting desires and ideas around concepts of beauty and femininity. This much I know: as I have all along, I will be doing my homework, taking it slow, and only moving ahead on steps I feel I must take in order to live as myself in the world.

I will end this part of my SRS blogging project with a random funny moment from my time at Asclépiade: the routine for dilation involves fishing the phallic utensil of the moment out of its bath of antibiotic solution, then holding it over the container so that the solution can drip. There's always one drop that won't fall, and when the dilator is too wet the lube slides off. So, innovating the other day, I came up with the technique of gripping the priapus firmly at the base and shaking it to air-dry it faster. "Pardon me whilst I waggle my dildo at you," I thought, and burst out laughing in the empty room.

Sometimes even really big important things go right. :-)

Melanie, and femme resurgent

Blogging in the wee hours again. Why fight it? The ongoing post-operative discomforts aside, I'm feeling energized. It is, however, a little late to get clever with structure - I am already shifting on my knees even know, trying to ease the kink in my back - so straight chronological reportage and a hastily tweaked first draft is what you get, Bub.

I posted (relatively) early Friday evening but then still couldn't sleep, and ended up back downstairs again at about 3am Saturday morning (about 24 hours ago). The only other person up was Melanie, the night nurse. She was lying on one of the couches in the living room wrapped in a blanket, trying to catch a nap, but she sat up and talked with me, and we ended up having an intense hour-long conversation (both of us switching back and forth between French and English, which was cool.)

I learned that Melanie is in her thirties, has a teenage son and a 16-month-old daughter named for two different strong women in her family's history, that she just bought a house where she now lives with her boyfriend, and that in addition to working here at Asclépiade she is also back in school for further studies in nursing. If I had seen her once and you asked me to describe her ethnicity, I would have said she was black, but in fact she has a white Canadian mother and a black Haitian father, and thinks of herself (she says) as white. She believes she got the job here because she talked in her interview about the feeling she knows from her heritage and upbringing of being stuck between two worlds.

Melanie and I discussed the similaries of the false binaries and mixed-up and complicated in-betweens of race and gender in North American culture. We talked about different peoples' definitions of happiness and success. She recited a poem for me in French; I did my voice-work practice poem, Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken" for her in English. I have met and connected with a lot of nice people here, but I think of Melanie as a new friend. Interesting that the one person I bond most closely with is not trans.

I was back in bed about 4:30a and slept until breakast, and the rest of Saturday was boring. Kept myself busy with French reading, walking, a DVD. Achieved the very important first bowel movement after surgery just in time to avert nursing intervention - I was starting to hear my name mentioned behind closed doors. A period of intestinal discomfort has followed; overdid it with the prune juice which is available at every meal...and that's enough mundane detail.

I went to bed early this past evening in hopes of actually sleeping when it was dark, but it was not to be; so up again to stand outside for a bit in the soft warm air of a Montréal summer night - and that's when the emotional dam burst. I started sobbing. Back inside, and thank goodness for Melanie, there with tissues and a long embrace. She also fetched me my ultimate comfort food of raisin cereal with soy milk, which I have been missing. Back to bed again for more crying. Not new reasons, just the real ones from all along, showing new facets at this phase of my transition. I really really really really really don't have to be a man any more. And I finally get to be loved for who I really am. 

When I was talking with Melanie over comfort-cereal we compared emotional landscapes. I taught her the English word "rollercoaster." "I don't cry very often," she said, "but when I do..." she groped for a phrase in English. "C'est comme un orage," I said - It's like a storm. She nodded. And I thought again of Eve Ensler's marvelous monologue about what it is to be a girl.

I wrote two posts ago about the possibility of turning back toward masculinity now that I am safely on this side of the surgery, and that might still happen, but right now I feel the resurgence of my femme truth. I am an emotional creature, and this is happening. It's really happening. I get to live.

Countdown, contra, pool hall encounter

So I’ve gotten all fancy with my entries and have forgotten to simply document. Here are some things which have been happening.

Surgery countdown continues. It’s 56 days away as of this typing - June 27th. As you can see, I am counting the days. I’m eager and scared and determined and curious, all at once. There has been a long wrangle about how to pay for it without impacting my children’s college funding, but I think I’ve figured that out. I’m getting pre-surgery tests soon, and arranging for various kinds of assistance I’ll need before, during, and after - a ride up, a ride back, a ride back to the airport for one of my rides. It’s complicated, but just the sort of detailed planning I’m good at. I’ll be taking five or six weeks off from work...and then life will go on.

I can’t imagine the outcome. I mean, really, I can’t. I move forward based on my fervent desire to get rid of the present accoutrements. It is enduringly unpleasant to feel estranged from parts of your own body.

I went contra dancing a few weeks ago, my first time approaching this particular gendered activity from the female side. I was anxious and it was hot, so after the first dance I began to sweat. The hormones have made it so that I don’t stink the way I used to, but still, it was embarrassing - my bangs plastered to my forehead. In the ladies’ room I poked at them in the mirror, and, forgetting myself for a moment, made a vexed remark in more or less my old male voice. A woman just coming out of a stall gave me a second look, but then went on her way. Aside from that moment, I didn’t see any of the double-takes or knitted brows or eyebrow-jumps or face-freezes I have learned to recognize as being read.

It was fun taking hands and being swung and spun by all those different men. It wasn’t sexual at all, but it was physical and gendered all the same. One guy lifted up my arm to spin me and I spun him instead. “Sorry,” he said, looking confused. Next time I go, I’ll work on letting go into following more. And I’ll dress less warmly. This time around I couldn’t resist wearing my new long-sleeve dress, to feel as femme as possible.

The other vignette I've been saving to narrate is an encounter with a man, a stranger. This was at Racks, a tavern on St. John St. in Portland, where I have started stopping some evenings on my way home from work to play pool. I had a table to myself and had worked my way through a couple games of 8-ball, playing both sides, when a male voice spoke behind me, asking if I was alone. I turned and looked. He was maybe 56 or so, tall and large-chested, tan, with coiffed white hair. He wore a sweatshirt and shorts, showing off muscular calves. His face was open and his eyes intent. He was shooting pool alone too - would I like to play? I said yes. We introduced ourselves and shook hands. The question of which of us would give up our table hung in the air. “It’s fine,” I said, not realizing until later what an eyeroller of a line it was. “I’ll turn in my balls.”

Bruce and I played two games before I had to leave to pick up the boy. He watched me in a steady searching way and complimented my better shots. He was a good player - not smashing the balls, as so many male players do, but finessing his leaves. He won both games, though we got down to the lone eight in the second. I liked his soft-spokeness and seeming gentleness. I also liked that he played for real. He didn't ease up or condescend.

Did I find him attractive? Yes. Was I in a tizzy? Only a little, and mostly because I hadn’t shaved since morning, so in strong light what remains as yet un-electrologized of my stubble would have been visible to him. I was also self-conscious about my voice, but then I'm always self-conscious about my voice. Overall I felt cautiously at ease. I’ve learned that once people have read you as one gender or the other, they tend to stick with that read. (One time last year after an hour-long workshop at a conference which I conducted in pretty much my old male vocal tones, a woman participant told me she loved my voice. “It’s so deep - you sound like Lauren Bacall.”)

Mostly I wasn’t in a tizzy because my experience from dating sites is that even decent kind thoughtful men are generally not interested once they know I’m trans, so I don’t get my hopes up. I work on the assumption that when it comes time to have that conversation (and I lean toward having it early in an acquaintance), that will be the end of any possible romance. Of course, it will take only one good man to prove I’m wrong about that, so I do hope a little. Not that it’s guaranteed that I’ll end up with a male partner, but I am definitely interested and curious.

After he sank the eight the second time I said I had to go and we shook hands. I said maybe I'd see him there again sometime, and he said he was from out of town, travelling, and only visited a few times a year. He leaned a little forward as he said this and let a silence open out and I sensed an opening, an opportunity to offer companionship. I would not have taken it even if I could - I had had enough novelty for one night. We shook hands again. There was the awkwardness which bespeaks mutual attraction. As my daughter would say, herp derp.

I was at Racks again earlier tonight and wondered if maybe he had left me a message at the bar, but apparently not. Bruce, I doubt we’ll ever meet again, but thank you for making me feel attractive and womanly. I liked you.

Other things have been going on - some expensive rejected insurance claims for hormone testing, which I’m trying to get covered, and some fruitful counseling with my son - but I don’t feel like writing about them at length right now. Maybe some other time. A sporadic irrational sense of doom aside, things are going pretty well. Half the days or maybe even more, I feel at least somewhat optimistic. Not bad.

 

Shooting pool at Blackstones

Sarah posts an open invite on fb to attend her birthday movie viewing (The Hunger Games) and hang out for drinks after. Can’t make the movie - still working, and anyway, saving it for Son16, in case he hasn’t seen it yet when he comes home again next week. Fat chance - he devoured the books - I’m sure he’s going this weekend - but still, just in case. The drinks part sounds fun, though, so I have my own dinner and a movie (Jeff, Who Lives at Home - slight, cute, worth seeing), jostle myself through the habitual shy fuddyduddiness, and show up around 9p at Blackstones, where I have never gone before in my life. In fact the only gay bar I have ever been to before was a couple times at Styxx, and that was strictly to dance.

Sarah and her entourage have not yet arrived. Anxious look around. Levi! He was my first crew leader when I started canvassing for No On One, back in the still being male in public days. He talked me down, the dear, after I got worked up arguing with Senator Nass. Hug. Banter. Already feeling less anxious. Over in the corner by the pool table, Steven! I know him from work. He beckons me over, and helps me feel even more at ease by narrating the place a bit - that guy there, trash, pure trash. It’s loud, which I don’t like, but I put little wads of tissue in my ears and feel better. Steven buys me a tonic with lime. What a sweetie! :-) I start to have fun.

Guys playing pool, badly. I find out how to put in for a game. There’s one intense skinny little guy in a white cotton tank and a fifties haircut who has a sweet stroke...if he settled down behind every shot he would own the table, but he tosses them off, and so misses some. The birthday posse arrives just before my game, so Sarah watches my purse while I play Tanktop. I’m tense and eager to make an impression, and so can’t see the angles and lose, though we do get down to the lone eight.

I get a glass of wine. A drunk guy hits on me. I brush him off. I sit and yak with Mike, Sarah, Anna, Sam. The wine works fast. I start to feel really buzzy good. I get another, waiting for my name to come up again on the pooltable chalkboard. I know from that time right after college when I got intense about pool that after two drinks everything else goes away and all I see is the geometry of the table. I feel myself entering that state of altered concentration. My name comes up.

The old heightened focus wins me a couple of games. The second guy I play is all over me, flirting drunkenly...I brush him off. I look in the big wall mirror and see myself, all girl in a room full of boys, and, you know what? Fuckin’ cute. Yeah! :-) I start dancing while waiting for my opponent to shoot. Another drunk guy hits on me. He is so persistent one of the bar guys comes over and leads him outside.

Tanktop comes up again, and we play once more down to the lone eight. He wins again after I choke on a makeable shot - still wanting to impress. Which I do anyway - the people watching who care about pool see it is a game, and I start hearing my name. 

It’s four or five names on the chalkboard to get another chance at the table, and after midnight. The birthday posse is decamping en masse. Tired. Home.

Am I straight or queer? Most of the evening I felt like a straight woman, because I was being so completely utterly gloriously Not. A. Man. in a room full of men who dig men. But, I also felt at ease and at home. I liked it. (Thank goodness for how bars are smoke free now.) I plan to go back. Gotta take another shot at Tanktop...and see if I can make a few friends, and explore a little more inhabiting “Queer” as an identity. Altogether, darling, a fabulous evening!

Posting without the usual wait until morning to rewrite. Curiosity about how many reads I’ve gotten will help me push through the hangover... :-)

Got the letter

There it was, at long last, in the mailbox on Monday - a big manila envelope with “Montreal” as part of the return address. I’ve been bracing for it for a couple of months now, thinking each day as I drive up to the boxes, “This could be it.” Well, this was it. Final decision time. Make the down payment and go through with the surgery, now less than four months away, or put it off.

On Tuesday I freaked. I melted down in the morning while wrangling the boy to school, then walked on Wells beach and sobbed. (I had the whole beach to myself, though it was a gorgeous spring-like morning.) The source of my anguish was a sudden powerful resurgence of a fear that going ahead with the surgery now would cause permanent psychological damage to my teenage son.

Actually, that’s understated. On Tuesday I caromed helplessly between black guilt and last-breath desperation to live. I forgot all about the possibility of a both-and outcome. Doom. Catastrophe. Dire dilemma. I felt that I had to either give up my life, or kill my child.

I cried some more in the beach parking lot, stopped to wash my splotchy face in the grocery store bathroom so I could bear to show it at Borealis when I stopped for a medicinal scone, and continued on to work. Then I made a good choice: I e-mailed Sarah, who is smart and Queer and who seems to have a greater capacity than most for the serene fielding of other people’s psychodrama. We met for coffee, and I poured out my confused jumble of hypertrophied emotion while she listened. The first words out of my mouth were “I may be projecting...” No, you think?

Here’s what I’ve figured out, talking to Sarah and pondering since: all my life I have had this powerful irrational fear that if I was ever fully myself, it would kill the people I love. I can feel the reverberations of it going back to earliest childhood. One of my pop-psych novelistic imagination theories is that when I was two or three I terrified myself into internal exile with the intensity of a murderous rage I felt toward my little brother, that...that BOY who had usurped my parents’ love.

Did I reach a little hand through the bars of his crib to cover his mouth and nose and snuff out his life? Did I then recoil in horror and self-loathing from the act I had momentarily contemplated? Was that the end of any chance I might have had to articulate my gender truth for years and years to come? Was I, in sum, a little girl too fierce, too headstrong, and too overwhelmed by her own ungoverned passions, to face living in the world? It all feels, if not literally, then psychologically true.

So Tuesday seems to have been an echo-spasm of the same complex of elemental feeling which was the source of my forty years of self-repression. Even as I talked to Sarah, the intensity of the feelings drained away. The last thing I said, in a bemused and wondering tone, was, “Can I really do this? Really?” And Sarah offered “Yes,” and hearing someone else say it like that, I knew it was right. (Sarah, thank you again for listening.)

Not that my son is thrilled about any part of my gender transition, but he’ll survive. We’ll all survive. I’ll be making that down payment, because I have finally figured out that I can be female without killing anyone. For me, that still counts as a bona fide revelation. What a fucking bizarre life.

Man in a dress no more

Yesterday I bought a dress. So what? Yeah, you’re right, not earth-shaking, but the moment does provide an object lesson in layers of becoming.

One of the first things I did after my gender revelation in ‘08 was buy a grey knit sweater-dress with a big floppy collar, at Reny’s. Oh, my, I was in state - terrified and ecstatic. I couldn’t conceive of trying it on in the store, so I took it home, discovered it was too small, and went back in an even more heightened state to exchange it. The flat hard look the young woman behind the returns desk gave me was my first encounter with the judgemental eyes of the world.

I had fun with my new dress. I put it on along with my new garter-belt stockings and black pumps and costume-jewelry pearls from Walmart and my outrageous rolled-up-sock-with-filbert-nipples boobs and posed for the camera. It was the beginning of figuring out who I was.

As time went on I acquired more dresses, of two types: fancy ones from the evening gown racks at Goodwill, and simpler everyday ones either bought without trying on or given by friends. I continued to have fun wearing both kinds at home, but the only time I wore a dress in public was when I put on one of the fancy ones for a soirée - the USM drag show, the EQ Maine dinner, a holiday party - and it was always a big deal. I never wore the simpler ones in public, even after I was completely out and living full time as a woman, because I just didn’t like the way I looked in them.

Yesterday I met Susan for a shopping date at the mall, and on the sale rack at Banana Republic I found a light soft grey-and-white V-neck dress in stretchy cotton. I tried it on and stood looking at myself in the three-way mirror. Susan looked with me.

Me, to myself: Shoulders back, dear. Chin up. Relax the lower back more, let it curve. Is it binding or bagging under the the arms? No, seems to be just right. Wow, not bad at all.

Susan: Oh, that’s really nice.

Me: I don’t know...I just don’t wear dresses. People don’t, you know? So it’s a thing.

Susan: What do you mean?

Me: Well, I have dresses, and I put them on and look in the mirror, and I see...I don’t know, I’m so tall, my shoulders are still so broad, my hips are narrow...I still see a man in a dress.

Susan: You don’t look like a man in a dress. I’m not just saying that. I want you to feel good, but I would say if you did. You don’t look like a man in a dress.

Me: Thanks, I needed to hear someone say that.

I bought the dress (Only $18 on deep discount - score!), and in a few months, maybe on the first really warm day of spring, I’m going to wear it to work. No back-up outfit in a bag in case I chicken out. I’m going to commit to the dress for the day. And honestly, I don’t think it’s going to be a big deal. Check out how far I’ve come:

12/31/2008:

1/15/2012:

OK, it's different doing comedy for straight people...

I did it - comedy open mic at Slainte, earlier tonight. Way more people in the room than when I went before to check it out - actual audience members, this time, instead of just the Soggy Biscuit Club. (Don’t ask me, I don’t know - some inside joke among the regular core comics, sure to be disgusting). I asked for the second slot, Brian the MC introduced me, I stepped up and did my routine...and the room was almost completely silent the whole time. I could tell some of my lines struck people as funny, because there was this whisper of suppressed laughter, but the rest of the time everyone sat frozen. Scanning the room I saw some listening faces, some carefully immobile faces, some clenched faces, and some crossed arms and heads down. Scattered applause at the end.

Did anyone read me until the moment I said my first line, "So, I used to be a man"? I don’t think so. That’s when I felt the room freeze. Not freeze like ice cold; freeze like deer in the headlights.  Possible thoughts among the audience right then: "Oh fuck, for a second I thought she, I mean he, I mean she, I mean he, was hot!" "Jesus, a fucking tranny." "Jesus, a fucking faggot." (The prejudiced are not always precise with their labels.) "So what?" "I don't want to know about this."  "Woah...she’s so brave!" "Cool!" And maybe mostly, "Shit, am I allowed to laugh at this?"

Did I, as they say, bomb? I don’t know and I don’t care. I went in wanting to work the material and get a little more stage experience...mission accomplished. I do believe I made some people squirm though, and upon reflection, that makes me smile. Fuck yeah. I’m a tranny, I’m smart, I’m funny, I’m kinda cute, and worst of all, I’m actually pretty normal. Deal, my dears. Unpucker your assholes and deal.

I caught Brian the MC between intros and gave him my e-mail address with a request for honest critique. I wonder if he’ll respond, and if so, what he’ll say. He did look me in the eye and talk normally to me, so he at least was not completely freaked out by my transness.

A couple of friends came to cheer me on - thanks Katz and Sophia! And thanks Chris for videoing! Katz and Sophia stayed after I left, so I asked Sophia to tell me if anyone ragged on me after I was gone. Will the PC impulse keep them mute? Will the juiciness of the material be too much to resist? I’m really curious if they will, and if they do, what tone it will take.

Will I go back? Not sure yet...it’s not out of the question. Tonight turned out to be about the one-shot opportunity to surprise a whole roomful of people. That won’t happen again...so, really I think I should go back at least once more and see what happens when they already know I’m trans as I approach the stage. We’ll see.

I get told I’m courageous a lot, which is really nice, but honestly I don’t usually feel courageous. Usually I’m just doing what I have to do to be me, sane, and alive. This was different, and this time I'll own the label: this *did* take courage. Yay for me! :-)

Voice truth through comedy

Almost a month since I last posted. Sorry! It’s because of a big development still in process, which I’m not ready to write about. Soon. In the meantime, a reverie on performance and voice.

I posted back in early August about my first experience performing on stage - a monologue I presented as a guest in the Femme Show which came touring through from Boston. Well, tomorrow night, it’s stage two of my performance project: I’m trying out a completely new routine (this one for straight people) at the comedy open mic at Slainte in Portland.

I am so not nervous, which I love. Of course, as in the Femme Show, my heart will be beating as I step up, but there is none of the old male-era fear - just an eager hunger for the rush, the heightened awareness, the challenge.

Last month I went with my friend Jessica, who has comedy performance experience, to check out the venue. Small crowd, young, male - mostly comics waiting their turn. The comedy was generally raw and profane, often pushed hard in an attempt to shock. Jessica leaned and whispered, “This is why I stopped doing stand-up...it’s such a boys’ club.”

Interesting wrinkle - I don’t think anyone read me that evening. “You ladies,” the MC said, addressing Jessica and me, and then we were the two ladies at the front table. Just in the past few months I have been passing more and more; and once people read you one way, I find, they really seem wired to stick with that. Illustrative anecdote: I presented a workshop at a conference a few weeks ago, and at the end, after an hour of me talking, one of my participants complemented me on my voice - she said it was so deep, I sounded just like Lauren Bacall. When I have to talk a lot I tend to drop back into male range, but she had read me as female in the first minute, and that remained her take.

Anyway, I hope that tomorrow night I continue to pass right up until the reveal of my first line - it’ll be more fun that way. Might be the only time too...if I keep doing this, soon I’ll be known as that trans woman comedian, and I may never get to startle an audience with my transness again.

I’ve had a lovely exchange of e-mails about comedy theory with my friend Dan who does volunteer voice work (of a very high caliber) at my radio station. He’s a serious student of standup, and gave me valuable critique of the video of the Femme Show routine. He has also urged me not to worry about whether I get big laughs or not, but just concentrate on the material and be as real as I can. This has always been exactly my plan, so I was grateful for the corroboration. And, he offered advice about finding a character’s voice, about letting go into it - and he was talking about “Lisa” as the character.

Hm. Fascinating. First reaction: no, that’s not right. Lisa is me; “Dave,” that guy you knew before, he was the character. But wait: I played Dave for my first 46 years, non-stop; I didn’t speak a single word myself. Surely at some point it’s not acting any more, it’s just being. And also: when I stop thinking about talking and just talk, I still sound more male than female. And I do continue to struggle with voice, so much...not to find a “feminine” voice, whatever that is, but just to find a voice I can be comfortable speaking in - a voice which sounds like me to me. Also, there’s no changing that I got a male vocal instrument - so the reaching for feminine feels artificial, often strained. So: am I Lisa who used to play Dave, or someone as yet unnamed playing Lisa, or what? No. I’m Lisa. But finding my voice is still much more a fruitless and frustrating labor than a natural relaxing into deeper realness, and it’s making me crazy.

Which brings me back to tomorrow night: the dominant vocal sound at the open mic was loud and deep....one male voice after another. The MC was particularly in our faces, as though he was projecting to a thousand-seat coliseum rather than a narrow bar. I think my best approach when I step up to that mic is going to be to take a deep breath, let most of it out again, and then nearly whisper my first line...and then, all the way to the end, keep it light, gentle, glinting with twisty little touches of humor in pastel hues. One of my worst lines at the FS was when I went loud and deep to convey vehemence. So, emphasis with vocal music rather than vocal strength. Capricious; whimsical; eccentric. Breathe! As I interpret my routine, I’ll be feeling deep for the sweet strong bizarre feminine voice I know I have hidden somewhere in me...striving to let it free. Breathe! The more radically my work differs from the dominant male mode of the room, the better it will be. Breathe! Take the time to be in the moment, then see the bigger joke this all is and ride the wave. Breathe! Yes, OK, I believe I'm ready.

Worry less, write more

I am alive! And significantly altered on left-over wine on a Monday night. But what the fuck. I’m 49 and working in an absurdly easy job until my youngest graduates from high school. In the river of life this is a long back-eddy, Mercury in retrograde, whatever. Moving backwards to move forwards. Backwards! (Onwards.)

Being interviewed at L.L. Bean was a surreal experience. The dead faces, the exquisite cheerfulness. Do you realize I have never in my life worked for a corporation? Except that one summer between sophomore and junior year, when I worked for the Curry Company, renting rafts to tourists and making their camp beds in the back-country of Yosemite. It is so fucking odd to go into a place where a whole bunch of people are making good money subscribing to the imperative of a commercial myth. World Class Customer Service. Figuring out how to feel good about riding the cash cow, I call it. And if anyone from Bean reads this blog, my job chances will be fucked. So be it. No one is paying attention.

And hey, I’m provisionally second-job employed. Money does turn out to matter, when you don’t have enough of it. Beyond that, I read somewhere recently, once you’ve got enough to live on more doesn’t make you any happier. So how did dollars become the ultimate measure of success? Nothing else turns people into such craven grasping wretches...not sex, not love, not alcohol, not drugs, not the hope of fame, not the fear of death. From time to time I think, I never learned to care about money, I fucked up my life. And the rest of the time I think...what an incredible moment! What a fucking rush! Once safe housed fed, the greatest pleasure is just to be alive; the rest is meaningless quanta of difference. You drive a fancier car than me. So the fuck what. I got to work safely today, and home again too. That’s all that matters.

Oh, and connecting with another. That matters too. What were the most important parts of my day today? Talking to friends. Jessica. Jenny. Feeling those moments of sympatico, empathy, non-exclusive non-familial non-sexual love. You spoke to me, I heard you; I spoke, you heard. Thank you. I love you.

Except for me mentioning it in this sentence, nothing in this entry is particularly about being trans. Being trans doesn’t define me. If anything defines me, it is that I write. Go ahead, I dare you...read me. It’s like fucking, only more intimate.

In between the previous two paragraphs I checked my e-mail and read a post in the Facial Feminization Surgery Yahoo group, in which one trans woman advised another to go to Dr. Z if she wants to be made artifically stunning, and to go to Dr. D in Argentina if she wants a natural feminine version of her old face. If you weren’t beautiful before, she says, you won’t be after, just female you. And just like that, I long-term plan to get a  Dr. D face. So, something trans after all.

Speaking of which, a friend taped my performance at the Femme Show for me and I put it on YouTube as a link you have to know to access. It so doesn’t suck, and I’m eager to share it with people, but I’ve kept it private out of concern that the wrong person at my son’s school might get ahold of it, and he would be embarrassed. but if you’d like to see it (and you don't go to Wells High School), let me know, and I’ll send you the link.

As part of an ongoing experiment the nub of which is to edit myself less the older I get, I’m posting this now.